The chunkiest chip

By Stephanie Pain

Today they are everywhere. Production lines controlled by computers and operated by robots. There’s no chatter of assembly workers, just the whirr and click of machines. In the mid-1940s, the workerless factory was still the stuff of science fiction. There were no computers to speak of and electronics was primitive. Yet hidden away in the English countryside was a highly automated production line called ECME, which could turn out 1500 radio receivers a day with almost no help from human hands.

The key to this miracle of manufacturing efficiency was this slab of Bakelite moulded with a pattern of grooves and filled with molten zinc – a forerunner of the integrated circuit. It would have taken hundreds of workers to match ECME’s output. All ECME needed was a couple of girls to feed in the Bakelite boards and someone to do the odd bit of maintenance. Did ECME and the plastic circuit board revolutionise the British factory? Not a bit of it. John Sargrove, the visionary engineer who developed the technology, was way ahead of his time. A few of the Bakelite boards survive in London’s Science Museum, but the ingenious machines that made them have been lost without trace.

THE Indian government ordered 20,000 of them. China’s president, Chiang Kai-Shek, bought 25,000 and might have ordered more if the People’s Revolution hadn’t disrupted his plans. By 1948, John Sargrove’s radios were selling like hot cakes in Asia and the Far East. Which was exactly what he had intended when he designed the world’s first automatic assembly line. The line turned out radios so cheaply that people in some of the world’s poorest nations could afford to

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